Rome's Election Billboards: Dinosaurs in the Age of Social Media?

 

This set of billboards, on via Tiburtina across from the Verano cemetery, is one of many in Rome intended for the the display of large political posters ("maxi-manifesti") that for decades have been a part of Rome's electoral campaigns, in this case European parliamentary elections that will take place in June. 

They are installed every year about this time on the city's sidewalks, which are mostly asphalt, then removed after the elections. Some say they interfere with the movement of pedestrians (especially those with disabilities), others that the installation process can damage the sidewalks. It is clear that they are costly; the cost each year to Rome taxpayers is about 300,000 Euro, or about $325,000. There are more than 5,000 of them, distributed in 166 locations within the 15 local jurisdictions in the capital. 

But the most interesting criticism is that they are increasingly irrelevant in an age when political communication takes place not through posters but on the social media, not to mention radio and television. A recent article in the Rome daily newspaper, Il Messaggero, describes the billboards as "immortal," resisting the inevitable: AI. One city official calls the billboards "medieval," an epithet that wouldn't have much resonance for Americans, but means something to Europeans. 

In 2023 critics advanced a proposal to eliminate the billboards. It failed because to do so would require changing a 1956 national law that established and underpins the system. 

Bill 

The set of billboards at center left have just been installed; they've been cleaned of old posters.

This set of billboards has also been recently installed, but already someone has put up posters for a trans/non-binary demonstration--probably an "illegal" poster.  

Most Photographed Building in Rome: Palazzo di Fantozzi

We have no doubt that the most photographed building in Rome is the Coliseum.  But the building most often presented in the city's newspapers isn't the Coliseum--or the Vatican, or the huge memorial to the triumph of Italian statehood known as the Vittoriano.  It is, and by far, the headquarters of the government of the Lazio region.  The regional government was once housed in the "square coliseum" in EUR, but since sometime in the early 1970s has been located in a distinctive structure on viale Cristoforo Colombo, on the edge of the quartiere of Garbatella.  From above (below right), the building takes the form of a an "H," with each of the four standards curving gently outwards; pod-like buildings occupy the openings in the "H."  We've heard the building was originally constructed for the Michelin Tire Company, and that what we've described as an "H" was actually an "X," once a Michelin symbol. 

Despite a lengthy internet search, we couldn't find much about the origins of the structure or its architect.  Our guess is that it's a very good building from 1960s or the 1970s--that is, after modernism had run out of ideas--decades that produced much that was awkward but also a few buildings of merit, like this one.  Although the internet contains the merest suggestion that the building opened in 1984, it is well known  (or at least widely claimed) that the building was the setting for some of the scenes in the Fantozzi film series; it featured a hapless Italian clerk/accountant (Fantozzi), and the first film opened in 1975.  So strong is the identification that the building is sometimes referred to as the Palazzo di Fantozzi.  Also fond of the building is the administrator of a group called "Nostalgici degli anni '70 & '80 (Nostalgics of the 1970s and 1980s).    Bill